We think the time is right to reimagine personal email. So today, we're introducing a preview of Outlook.com - modern email for the next billion mailboxes. We realized that we needed to take a bold step, break from the past and build you a brand new service from the ground up. You already know Outlook via the Outlook desktop application-for PCs and Macs-as the world's most popular application for reading email, managing a calendar, and connecting to people. And you may have used the Outlook Web App connected to Exchange Server in your organization. Now, in addition to a desktop application and a service for businesses, we're offering Outlook as a personal email service - Outlook.com.

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First of all, this post is dedicated to my aunt Gayla who runs a small business and has a lot of trouble with this feature. This post is not dedicated to those who might use this feature for spamming. :) Mail merge is a feature of Outlook and Word that allows you to send a set of contacts a personalized e-mail as though they are the only person receiving the e-mail. With this feature, you can personalize the e-mail so that each of your recipients is the only person on the To: line and that the contents...

Since we launched the Outlook.com preview a few days ago, we've been humbled and amazed by the reception and by the number of people who have upgraded. In fact, in just the first few days alone, we've seen several million people upgrade to Outlook.com. Over the next week we'll write a series of posts covering upgrading and using Outlook.com, starting with this post covering upgrading from Hotmail, and then followed by posts discussing upgrading from Gmail, Yahoo, and other services. These are all written by Dick Craddock, who runs the Program Management Team for Outlook.com.

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A common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as whether it has an attachment or that it has a particular category applied. Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify these parameters easily and get a better set of results - finding what you want even faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easy!

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“I tried to send a large attachment to a friend and now the e-mail is stuck in my Outbox! I’ve been trying to delete it and I can’t because Outlook says it’s still trying to send it. Help!” This is a fairly common issue that we’ve heard a lot of users report through the blog, so we wanted to write a quick post and explain the easiest way to get out of this situation. E-mail messages can get stuck in the Outbox for a few different reasons, but the most common case...

(This post was first published in 2010. It's obvious from the number of hits this page gets that people's inboxes are still overflowing. We thought we'd share it again to help you out.) Hi, I am Roby Kurian, Product Manager for Outlook. How often do you ask yourself, “Where’s that message?” Whether you are a filer (you keep messages carefully organized in folders) or a piler (you keep all of your messages in your Inbox), these three tips can help you find that elusive message. Personally...

We are excited to announce the Outlook Social Connector! The Outlook Social Connector is a set of new features to help keep track of your friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The Outlook Social Connector is available now as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta. The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name...

For everyone using the Outlook 2010 Technical Preview, there are a number of improvements for working with multiple Exchange accounts. My name is Andrew Sullivan, I’m a Program Manager working on Outlook and it’s my pleasure to highlight some of these improvements. Connect to more than one Microsoft Exchange account simultaneously. If you’ve worked with more than one Exchange account in Outlook 2007 or earlier, you may have resorted to using multiple Outlook profiles to access your...

One of the things we have improved in Outlook 2010 is IMAP accounts. IMAP is a protocol that is used by many e-mail services, including Gmail and AOL. If your e-mail service supports IMAP, you can use Outlook to access your e-mail. Here are some of the IMAP improvements in Outlook 2010: Automatic configuration If you have an e-mail account that supports IMAP, your account can be automatically configured in Outlook 2010. All you need to set up your account in Outlook 2010 is your e-mail address and...

Having a printed copy of your Outlook calendar can be quite convenient. If the available printing options aren’t sufficient for your needs you should try the Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007 . The Calendar Printing Assistant supports a wide variety of layout templates and allows you to print multiple shared calendars at once. Here are some examples: The Calendar Printing Assistant is a separate program from Outlook. After you install it from the link above, you can find...